The strange economics of open source

Almost every modern digital service relies on software written by people who are not paid to write it. Banks, hospitals, governments, social networks: all of them depend on enormous amounts of open source code, much of it created and maintained by unpaid volunteers in their spare time. This situation is, when you stop to think about it, extremely strange. Imagine if the world's bridges had been built by hobbyists who happened to enjoy welding, with no contracts and no salaries. We would consider it a miracle that any of them stood up. And yet it works, mostly. Open source software is often more reliable than its commercial alternatives, because anyone can inspect it, report problems, and propose fixes. The result is a kind of distributed quality control that no single company could afford to replicate. The system also has serious cracks. In 2014, a security vulnerability called Heartbleed put millions of websites at risk. It was found in a critical library that was, at the time, maintained by a tiny handful of volunteers. The incident exposed an uncomfortable truth: a great deal of digital infrastructure depends on people who are exhausted, underfunded and easily replaced by their own burnout. Some big companies have started to address this by hiring open source maintainers and contributing money to foundations. The trend is positive but slow. Until it accelerates, we will continue to live in a world where the foundations of digital society are propped up by an unusual combination of generosity, professional pride, and luck.